Framing Sino-Japan competition

Drivers and responses across the military, economic, and diplomatic sectors

ByJeffrey Reeves, Jeffrey Hornung

This chapter establishes an empirical basis of Sino-Japanese competition, which the volume's subsequent case studies examine in more detail. It This chapter outlines areas of competition between China and Japan that shape the countries' respective military, economic, and diplomatic strategies and that influence and shape Asia's regional security dynamics. The chapter's intents is to demonstrate how threat perceptions between the two states contribute to and influence East Asia's regional security complex. It highlights ways that Chinese and Japanese responses to one another construct a regional environment in which security develops and states act. Chinese leaders view Japan's economic activity in Asia as complicating China's own economic engagement strategy, with corresponding strategic implications for China's military and diplomatic activities in the region. Many Chinese view Tokyo's continued military and diplomatic alliance with the US as a stumbling block for closer Sino-US relations and as a contributing factor to regional instability.